The Poetry Marathon

Write a non-traditional love poem. Both the words non-traditional and love are open to your interpretation.

Write a poem inspired by a writer that you admire. The poem should mention the name of the writer explicitly at least once. The writer’s influence should be seen in the content or the tone of the poem.

Listen to the song Your Hand in Mine by Explosions in the Sky, and write during it. If the song is up before your poem is finished, play it again. It is a good song to write to in part because it has no lyrics.

You can listen to the song here.

Grab a random book from your shelf. It can be a book of any genre. Use either the first sentence from the first chapter or the last sentence from the last chapter as the opening line of the poem. Make sure to note the name of the book and the author in a footnote to the poem.

This prompt is to take a common proverb, such as “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” and turn it into a poem. You can choose any proverb or common saying. The proverb can appear as it normally does in the poem, or you can twist it. It can be a small part of the poem or its core.

What one physical object (I am not talking about your dog or cat or baby, but a possession) would you save in case of a fire? Your prompt this hour is to write a poem about that possession.

Write a sestina! A sestina is a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words appearing in the closing three-line envoi.

Does that sound intimidating and time consuming? It only is if you do it from scratch, however there is a website that helps with the creation of sestinas: http://dilute.net/sestinas/

All you have to do is come up with 6 words and they will figure out the order of everything, then you can add the rest of the text yourself. A sestina can really get you writing about something you would normally not. They are great in that way.

Write a poem that has a chance of being very meaningful to someone you are very close to, or someone you want to be close to.

For this prompt I want you to write about food. Literary writing with a theme has become much more popular lately and there are a surprising number of literary journals devoted to publishing creative work about food.

You can tackle this theme from any angle. You can write about how much you love or hate a certain kind of food, you can rant about gluten intolerance, you can write about your favorite meal, or what food you loved as a child. The particulars are all up to you.

The Road Not Taken is one of the most famous poems ever written. I want you to take that poem and write your own completely original work. The title can be the same but everything else should be different. You can choose to focus on updating the poem, or re-writing it using different words, or take the theme and explore it in a different way. Your poem could just focus on mimicking the tone. You can do anything that you want as long as it ties in with Frost’s poem in some way.